ART: JON BOROFSKY SHOW

By JOHN RUSSELL

Published: November 18, 1983

THE work of Jon Borofsky has always kept clear of the traditional postures of exhibited art. To hang flat on the wall in a frame does not suit it. When it comes in three dimensions, it rejects the very notion of a plinth. Nor does it chime with the ancient idea that works of art need space and solitude to be seen at their best.

The ideal Borofsky exhibition is, in fact, one in which the individual works nudge and jostle one another like people waiting on a subway platform. They talk, they sing, they light up, they do a little dance. In Berlin, they flew through the air. In London, they set up an inscrutable hammering way above the visitors' heads.

They have no one coherent idiom. Nor do they ask to be looked at in any one way. Theirs is a world in which hierarchies long ago ceased to exist. A small piece of paper tacked on to the wall may be as important as a large finished painting in acrylic on canvas. The artist's dreams play an important part in his work, but so do intimations of an urgent and topical sort. The final effect is that of a pacific pandemonium in which we have to be as quick off the mark as the artist is himself if we are not to miss part of the point. Borofsky's current show at the Paula Cooper Gallery, 155 Wooster Street, is the best possible introduction to his work. Substituted for the cathedral hush of the traditional art gallery is a roar of barely decipherable sound, much of it owed to songs written and recorded by Borofsky himself. (Other sounds are made by mechanized men who keep up a clack, clack, clack of obsessional chatter.)

Huge molecular figures square off at one another like an Atomic Age Cain and Abel. Illuminated hoops flash through the air like the portents that foretold the death of Julius Caesar. A blown-up version of a five-cent stamp from El Salvador - the pride, as it happens, of the artist's childhood collection - hangs not quite straight on the wall. A molecular executive, briefcase in hand, strides through the tumultuous scene with the air of one who refuses to be late for his next meeting.

Everywhere we step, there is an idea, an image or a cluster of sound that calls out for our attention. The result is chaos, but chaos ordered by a true poet whose work functions on a hundred levels at once. (Through Dec. 3.)

Also of interest this week: ''Donald Judd: Early Work'' (Blum-Helman, 24 West 57th Street): People are always hoping that Conceptual Art will wither and die, but to this particular pair of eyes, its major achievements look better than ever.

The early work of Donald Judd, for instance, has to do with matters that do not date. Among them are scale, reason, order, proportion, significant repetition and sensitivity to materials. They are no more going to go out of style than the sequence of numbers that runs from 1 to 10 is going to go out of style.

The choice of works from the early- and mid-1960's at the Blum-Helman Gallery is particularly well chosen in respect of Judd's use of materials. In a vertical stack of boxes that dates from 1967, the use of green lacquer on galvanized steel gives a sleek distinction to forms that might otherwise look blunt and impersonal. In a painting of 1961 what might have been a bald, unresonant image is given a new complexity by the use of cadmium red on Liquitex and of sand over Masonite with yellow Plexiglas.

Equally well, in later works that have their point of departure in geometrical progressions, the elegant simplicity of the presentation is more than ever impressive in the 1980's, when so much of the art that we have to look at is given over to posturing and opportunism. (Through Dec. 3.)

''Realism and Abstraction: Counterpoints in American Drawing 1900- 40'' (Hirschl & Adler, 21 East 70th Street): Hirschl & Adler's new show is, in effect, a concise history of American drawing in the first 40 years of this century. As such, it covers the ground all the way from Glackens, Luks and Sloan, who worked well indeed as draftsmen-illustrators, to such pioneers of American modernism as Stuart Davis, George L. K. Morris and others less familiar. It makes for a consistently lively display, and one freighted with agreeable surprises.

Readers who remember Joseph Stella for his overworked and often labored attempts to Americanize the language of Futurism may, for instance, be delighted to see a group of his exact and delicate drawings of flowers. Charles Sheeler, likewise, makes a cameo appearance as a flower draftsman. Isamu Noguchi turns up as a self-portraitist. George Morris make a contribution to the iconography of the circus. Morgan Russell, best known for forays into color abstraction, comes into view as a student of the Michelangelesque male nude. Arshile Gorky is on hand with a drawing that he once gave as a souvenir of private affection to his colleague David Burliuk.

Among the artists who are not so well known, this visitor responded, above all, to the precise, unemphatic and subtly constructed studio interiors of Hans Weingaertner (1896-1970), to a portrait drawing in a modified Ingrist idiom by Durr Friedley (1888- 1938) and to ''Abstraction,'' dated 1929, by Blanche Lazzell (1878-1956). There were not many artists of any nationality who could sail so close to Picasso in the year 1929 and not look silly. (Through Dec. 30.)